


Young Savage Thing

by rillrill



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Gen, Johanna Mason cannot catch a break, POV Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-30
Updated: 2012-03-30
Packaged: 2017-11-02 18:09:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/371866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rillrill/pseuds/rillrill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>“Make me look pitiful,” she says, “and maybe they’ll feel sorry for me.”</i> How Johanna Mason won her Games and lost everything else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Young Savage Thing

On her victory tour, they’ll ask her how she did it, what was she thinking, what was going through her head when she was in the arena?

She’ll shrug and crack jokes, “What makes you _axe_ that?” and everyone will laugh, but she won’t tell them the truth, which is that really, when she was in the arena, she didn’t start out with a plan; she was just scared shitless of dying.

 

At the Reaping, when her name is called, no one volunteers for her because why would they? No one knows this girl. She keeps to herself, goes from school to the forest and then home after dark, wanders through the pine trees and humming the ancient poetry to herself: _This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks._ She’s at least sixteen, but small for her age – barely passes for fourteen.

“District 7, I give you your female tribute, Johanna Mason,” says the orange-skinned woman from the Capitol, and no one says a word, they just look at her like another lost cause. 

 

“What ever are we going to do with you?” asks the stylist, sighing with great chagrin as he looks her skinny body up and down. There’s no use in trying to dress her up sexy; she hasn’t got the lush curves and strong muscles of the girls from 1 and 2, nor the bronze skin and flowing hair of the siren from 4. She’s a tiny thing, practically stunted, a seedling ripped out of the earth just as she was beginning to take root. Her hair lies lank and stringy and her eyes seem to have permanent bags beneath them. 

She shrugs. “Make me look pitiful,” she says, “and maybe they’ll feel sorry for me.”

The stylist huffs and sighs and throws another tree costume at her.

 

She bombs the interview. She’s uncomfortable under the lights, hates the audience as they stifle their laughs at her awkward responses to Caesar Flickerman’s inane questions. How did her family react at the Reaping? “Well, they weren’t too thrilled, what with their only daughter going into a death match and all.” Does she have a favorite winner from previous games? “Not really. I don’t know. I guess not.” 

 

In training, she skirts around the table of axes and heads for the survival skills instead. She memorizes poisonous plants, ties knots, climbs trees. When it’s her time to impress the gamemakers, she ineffectually tosses a mace she can barely lift and halfheartedly tosses a spear at a dummy.

Her final score is a 5. Her mentor musters up as much of a smile as he can and pats her on the shoulder. It seems odd for him to be so deeply disinterested in her performance, but as Boy Seven, a swarthy lumberjack’s son, is already fixing to be allied with the Careers, Johanna assumes he believes she’s simply a lost cause.

 

Boy Seven dies in the bloodbath. Takes a spear to the side almost as soon as he makes it to the Cornucopia. 

_Boom._

Johanna runs for the forest with no regard for the supplies before her. She picks up a backpack later that evening, wrenching it off the body of Boy Twelve. Water, a sad little knife not made for throwing or slitting throats, a blanket made to retain heat. She can work with this. She'll have to.

 

She makes no allies. She speaks to no one. She moves through the forest silently, one foot in front of the other, scales trees and eats pine nuts and bark. Deep in the forest on day five, she picks up an axe left behind by a fallen tribute. She hurls it at trees, over and over again, making up for the time she lost sandbagging the gamemakers in the training center.

On day seven, something in her just breaks. She realizes, half with horror and half with glee, that she doesn’t want to win by default. Her original plan to wait out the Games until the other 23 tributes have all slaughtered each other or dropped dead of natural causes is taking far too long, and after all, how is that interesting? How will that help her go down in history?

When nineteen cannons have sounded, she smiles to herself. It’s time to turn back.

 

There are four others left alive when she reaches the Cornucopia. Boy Two is already near death, scratching furiously at a weeping full-body rash brought on by a spider mutt, clawing at his skin and begging someone, anyone, to put him out of his misery. Johanna obliges with a swift stroke of her axe; he falls motionless to the ground.

_Boom._

Girl Four is next to venture into the open, a glittering mermaid of a girl, the Capitol favorite to win – “You certainly are a beautiful creature!” Caesar had fawned during her interview, unable to tear his eyes from the seashells covering her breasts. Her face, now, is streaked with blood; Johanna sees, as she gets closer, that the mermaid girl’s left eye socket is an empty, bloody hole.

The Capitol could have given her such a pretty replacement. She’s just off-kilter enough as to notice just a moment too late when Johanna flies across the field and buries the axe in her back.

_Boom._

Two left.

Boy One takes out Girl One himself as the evening turns into night, fucks her into the dirt and bushes, pins her down and slits her throat as she gasps and cries his name. What an amateur move, Johanna thinks, as she lurks in the shadows and waits.

He’s enjoying a post-coital, post-killing moment of quiet, smirking as Girl One disappears into the hovercraft. His pulse barely has time to return to normal before little Johanna Mason, the Girl from Seven, is bearing down on him, slicing and swinging the axe until she’s covered in his blood.

_Boom._

 

She doesn’t make for a good Capitol whore (surprise, surprise). She is too skinny, too brittle, too cold to the touch. Her few customers come away disappointed, let down by her lack of enthusiasm and general disinterest in the activities for which they’re paying her. Finnick (sweet, handsome Finnick, the only victor who can laugh off her sarcastic jibes at his expense; god only knows what he sees in her but all the same, she appreciates the quiet, sexless company between the men who want to choke and hit her) shakes his head, tells her to get used to it. “This is your life now, Jo,” he says. “This is victory.”

She lights a cigarette and looks away, doesn’t meet his eye as she chips away at the lacquer they put on her nails. Her lips are smeared with the bright lipstick her latest customer watched her put on and she leaves technicolor smudges on her third, fourth, fifth glasses of wine.

He sighs. “Honestly, it’s like you don’t understand how this place functions.” There is a piece of hair sticking up on the back of his head, a silly little cowlick, and Johanna represses the urge to smooth it down for him, because who the fuck does that? In this light, he reminds her uncannily of the girl she killed in the arena – the beauty from Four – so much that they could be related. But he’s never mentioned having a sister or any other relative in the Games, not in all the time (a few months, but they’ve felt like an eternity) that she’s known him. As far as she can tell, to him, the only woman that matters is the girl back home, some curly-haired little sprite he mentored before she lost her mind.

Johanna takes another drag on her cigarette and exhales slowly, the smoke illuminated by the dim institutional lighting in the standardized Capitol apartment. “Well,” she says, “it doesn’t fucking matter whether I know how it functions or not. I don’t plan to spend the rest of my life here.”

“Really?” he says with a derisive laugh, scratching at the back of his neck lazily. “Pray tell, how do you plan to manage that?”

She smiles. “The same way I ended up here.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake. You can’t kill your customers, Johanna.”

“Why not? That’s what they’re paying for. One night with a ruthless killer, remember?”

“It’s the celebrity they’re drawn to,” says Finnick, shaking his head. “They only care that you’ve been on TV; they don’t give a damn how you got there.”

“We’ll see,” she says, giving him a noncommittal shrug. “Your problem, Finn, is that you don’t think outside the box.”

“I have someone who depends on me.”

“So do I.”

“It’s not the same for you. Your parents, your brothers, they all got along fine before you won and they would get along fine even if you had died. I don’t – I wish you knew what it was like to have someone you loved. Someone you’d do anything for.”

She raises her eyebrows. He doesn’t seem to notice. 

(She doesn’t mean _him_ or anything, though. Heaven forbid. She doesn’t go for the pretty boys and while he obviously likes his girls crazy, she has a sneaking feeling that “axe murderer” is not exactly his type.)

 

When she returns to Seven, dishonorably discharged from Capitol duty as an “erotic servant” to her new home in Victor’s Village, there is no one left to greet her.

This is victory, then.

_Boom._


End file.
